Market Annealing: Getting to $10M ARR in Early Markets

Reading this was hard because having failed a few years ago, after 7 years and $3m raised for a B2B content marketing startup, it all rings so true.

We hired a VP of Sales (who was previously VP of Sales at a public company) when we had $20k MRR (avg deal size was $3k/mo), non of the four founders /wanted/ to lead sales, we hired a $5k/mo PR firm… we blew so much money trying buy our way out of figuring out repeatable GTM motions. Realistically, as founders, we were not up to the task.

a16z is now a glorified shitcoin criminal enterprise. I urge everyone to never let them participate in a round ever again.

Failure of fiduciary duties fucked over their LPs and their shitcoin pump/dumps fucked over retail.

They'll now try to salvage their brand but a perma-ban is in order IMO

Very important subject matter for any B2B founder to be conversant in. The problem is that the devil is in the details, and it draws my skepticism to see that this article has not included any examples from A16Z portcos. Why is that the case? I am sure that for each of these principles, the authors could have found numerous examples to serve as mini case studies for each of these principles. That would make the content have a lot more bite.

There's a small fund run by GTM operators, https://www.gtmfund.com/

> We're a fund comprised of 250+ GTM leaders. We invested $6M in 2021, $15M in 2022, and plan to invest $50M over the next 2 years. We invest early (pre-Seed to A), writing $200k to $750k checks, and specializing in B2B SaaS.

This is generic advice like the ones found in low effort SEO blogs with nonsensical analogies thrown in.

TLDR:

- you are effed if you aren't doing sales as a founder.

- don't outsource anything that touches customers--basically do everything while bringing functional experts to do those tasks and decrease your load as a founder, so that you can do more sales.